Seagate has been a leader in the storage industry for more than 30 years. Beginning with the industry's first 5.25-inch hard drive, the company has lead the way, growing to become one of the world's largest manufacturers of storage products. Seagate currently manufactures a wide range of products for both consumer and enterprise applications. Along with internal and external hard drives for the mobile and desktop markets, it offers a growing number of solid state and hybrid drives.

Earlier this year, Seagate introduced its first client solid state drive, the 600 SSD. Available in both 7mm and 5mm z-heights, the 600 SSD is the ultimate laptop upgrade for road warriors, power users, executives and gamers. With no moving or mechanical parts, this drive is more rugged and shock-resistant than standard hard drives. The 600 SSD also combines Link A Media Devices' (LAMD) LM87800 controller with Toshiba's 19nm Toggle mode MLC NAND flash to deliver faster boot up speeds, shorter application load times and improved system responsiveness.

The 600 SSD is available in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities. For this review, Seagate sent us the 240GB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 550 MB/s sequential read and 450 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 80,000 random read and 70,000 random write IOPS.

Seagate 600 SSD 240GB Solid State Drive

General Specifications

Product Number

ST240HM000

Capacity

240GB

Flash Type

Toshiba 19nm MLC NAND

Controller

Link A Media Devices LM87800

Cache

256MB DDR2

Form Factor

2.5-inch

Interface

SATA III 6Gb/s

Performance

Sequential Read

550 MB/s Max

Sequential Write

450 MB/s Max

Random Read (IOPS 4K)

80,000 Max

Random Write (IOPS 4K)

70,000 Max

Power Consumption

Sleep

0.6 W

Standby

0.6 W

Idle

1.1 W

Operating

0.75 W

Environment and Reliability

Temperature (Operating)

0 ºC to 70 ºC

Temperature (Non-Operating)

-40 ºC to 75 ºC

Humidity

5% to 95%, non-condensing

Shock

1500G, 0.5 ms

Vibration

11.08 Grms, 20-2000Hz

MTBF

2.4 million hours

Dimensions and Weight

Dimensions

69.85 mm x 100.45 mm x 7.0 mm

Weight

77g

Other Features

Available in both 7mm and 5mm z-heightsSupports TRIM, SMART and Native Command QueueingState-of-the-art on-the-fly error-correction algorithms.Three year warranty

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the 600 SSD has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Seagate's new consumer SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the 600 SSD have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Seagate? Keep reading as we find out.